“A painting is more than the sum of its parts.”

— Wendelin Van Draanen , Flipped

Source: Flipped

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A painting is more than the sum of its parts." by Wendelin Van Draanen?

Wendelin Van Draanen 47

American writer 1965

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 176
Context: Even these humble objects reveal that our reality is not a mere collocation of elemental facts, but consists of units in which no part exists by itself, where each part points beyond itself and implies a larger whole. Facts and significance cease to be two concepts belonging to different realms, since a fact is always a fact in an intrinsically coherent whole. We could solve no problem of organization by solving it for each point separately, one after the other; the solution had to come for the whole. Thus we see how the problem of significance is closely bound up with the problem of the relation between the whole and its parts. It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

“A system is more than the sum of its parts.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 42.

“A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.
Ackoff (1973) "Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS." in: Operations Research Vol 21, pp. 664.
1970s

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (1928, 1933), p. 305; as cited in: Cliff Hooker ed. (2011) Philosophy of Complex Systems. p. 189

“I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “It's that way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it's sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.””

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Flipped (2001)

“The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

The Hindu, "Strengthening Indianness ", Sunday, Jan 19, 2003, Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2003/01/19/stories/2003011900240300.htm
2000s

“A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole. It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1973) "Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS." in: Operations Research Vol 21, pp. 664.
1970s

“There's a reason for poetry… Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton, as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science (1996) p. 201.

“A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: The Alphabet of Grace

“A painting is more than the sum of its parts.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Wendelin Van Draanen 47

Related quotes

Related topics